News and Updates

Recent Events and HighlightsDuring the spring semester of 2015, Dr. Pelayo worked tirelessly as director of the conference presented in homage to García Márquez,
"Literature Across Disciplines: Gabriel García Márquez: Translation & Criticism" on
April 17.

The conference was a great success! Edith Grossman, world-renowned translator extraordinaire,
closed the conference. The first paper was delivered by Yale University scholar Aníbal
González, and the opening remarks were by Dr. Bette S. Bergeron, the Provost and Academic
Vice President of SCSU.

The program included personal accounts of how eight panelists entered the world of
García Márquez: from Russia to Guatemala, from China to Colombia, from Taiwan to the
United States, and from marriage-and-divorce to a home library where One Hundred Years of Solitude was seemingly, as if in a magic-realist world, hard to find. Professors Arboleda
and Zúniga added the folk-touch with a sample dance of a "vallenato," music that was
very dear to García Márquez.

The following video of the conference was produced by Jake Grubman. As Edie Grossman
kindly put it, "It's a beautiful record of an outstanding day."

Video I –narrated in Spanish with English subtitles-- is a succinct biography of
Gabriel García Márquez intended to celebrate his unparalleled fame in all modern languages.
The video stresses his identity, his journalist skill as chronicler, as a writer,
and his often mistaken year of birth. The video conveys the idea of a writer who
can also be seen as a husband, father, friend, and as a private man. Winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he is, undoubtedly, the most popular writer of
the 20th Century in the Spanish Language.

Video II –narrated in Spanish with English subtitles-- is an insightful look at
García Márquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. The video takes the
viewer through the first short stories and novels that led to the making of this opus
magnum with commentaries by world-wide known authors, and analogies with Sophocles,
Kafka, and Faulkner. Intended for a world audience, this video presentation brings
forward a broader school of Spanish criticism and a perceptive analysis of thematic
issues often reduced in Anglo-speaking settings. The novel, according to Pelayo,
is many present-day societies in the abstract.